In response to Adam Schefter’s report from Sunday that the league will take up at the annual meetings in March the question of whether the Lions should continue to host a Thanksgiving Day game, we’ve tried to do some digging as to the rules for determining this specific aspect of the schedule.

Here’s what we’ve learned.

Scheduling falls squarely within the jurisdiction of the Commissioner’s office.  So, in theory, it’s up to the Commissioner to determine who plays on any given Sunday (or, as the case may be, Thursday).

But, as a practical matter, the fact that the Commissioner has complete authority over a certain issue doesn’t mean that he should exercise it imprudently.  In the end, he answers to the owners of the 32 member clubs, and if they think he’s abusing his power, they could possibly go Fay Vincent on him.  (If you’re too young to know what we’re talking about, Google the guy’s name. And, yeah, there’s a guy named “Fay.”)

When it comes to the Thanksgiving Day schedule, this is clearly an area where the Commish would be wise to tread lightly.  The Lions don’t want to lose the game; if the Commissioner would unilaterally take it away from the franchise, he would acquire a motivated and hostile enemy.  Moreover, Cowboys owner Jerry Jones, one of the most powerful and influential men in the sport, would potentially regard a change in the Turkey Day lineup as a too-close-for-comfort move against his own team’s supposedly permanent spot on the schedule.

So, if it’s going to happen, it needs to be something that originates with one of the owners, and that a sufficient number of other owners ultimately will support. 

Several years ago, late Chiefs owner Lamar Hunt made a run at introducing a measure requiring the Thanksgiving games to rotate.  Hunt’s resolution did not pass.  (Since then, the league has added a Thankgiving game in the evening, which rotates.  To date, the Chiefs, Falcons, and Eagles have hosted it.) 

Surely, the Ford family would respond to any effort to strip their franchise of the annual game by arguing that it should be a rotation for every game or none of them, which would pull the Cowboys onto the Lions’ side of the issue.  Whether the other owners would vote to rotate the early game or every game played on Thanksgiving remains to be seen.

For now, though, the only thing that seems to be reasonably clear in this regard is that Commissioner Roger Goodell will not simply invoke his inherent authority over the schedule to take the long-standing Thanksgiving Day home games away from the Lions or the Cowboys.  If it’s going to happen, it’s going to happen as a result of a sufficient consensus among ownership of all of the league’s 32 franchises.